Latest revision as of 12:17, April 6, 2013

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A signature identifies you as the author of a block of text. It should contain an automatic link to your user page, making it easy for others to learn more about you and communicate with you. The date contained in the signature also indicates how current the discussion is and the order in which comments were made.

On talk pages and old-style forum pages, signing your name helps others to keep track of discussions, and to understand who holds which opinions. This is considered good "Wikiquette".

Generally, your contributions to articles, help pages, policies, and other content pages should not be signed. Likewise it is not necessary to sign message wall posts, comments, or posts in the new forums as these include your avatar, username and time of post by default.

To do this, go to your Preferences (on any wikia) and check the I want to use wikitext in my signature checkbox. Then enter

[[User:Example|]] ([[User talk:Example|talk]])

in the Custom signature: field above the checkbox.

You can add other customizations to this signature -- colored text, a funny name, a small image, a special font, etc. by adding the appropriate wikitext to the signature box in your preferences.

Check with your wikia's community for whether there are any rules about styles in signatures.

Note: When you test out your signature, keep in mind that a link to the current page will not be displayed as a clickable hyperlink. So the "link" to your talk page in your signature will not be clickable when placed on your own talk page.

Anonymous users and signatures

If you chose to edit Wikia without logging in, but leave a signature, the tildes will be converted to your IP address. However, it can be easy to confuse two similar IPs in a conversation, so it may make more sense to manually sign your posts with a pseudonym or tag such as --janedoe. Note that choosing not to sign with tildes does not keep your IP address private, since the IP still appears in the page history.

What about signatures in other character sets?

If your signature is in a character set not in wide usage on the wikia you are signing on, it may be easier for users there to recognize you if you add a version of your name in the character set of that wikia.

In addition to difficulties users may have in remembering and using a name in a script which is foreign to them, characters from many scripts (such as Chinese, Hindi, or Georgian) may display as boxes or mojibake (garbage characters) for users without the proper fonts installed.

In these cases, you might want to add an additional nickname to your signature that is more understandable on that wikia. For example, you could use something like [[User:快樂|快樂 (Happiness)]] or [[User:快樂|快樂 (Felicidad)]] in the Custom signature: field.

Where can I find more help?

The English Wikipedia has various pages relating to signing comments, and to making comments in general, which may help to guide your project's development of signature and talk page policies.